Long, long ago, when the Family Trunk Project was just getting started and I was trying to work out how to use two different blogs, I decided that I would keep that blog fiber-related, and over here I would post both fiber stuff and all that other blogging that I would be doing. Yeah...ALL that other blogging. Oh, there has been so much of it.
Like, remember the Biography Project idea? Believe it or not, I have more or less stuck to this reading schedule (minus Gertrude Stein and plus a fantastic biography on Emily Post), but have I written about it? I have not. I have to admit that this whole pattern-writing malarkey has been significantly more time-intensive than I had anticipated. BUT. I'm hoping to change all that, starting soon.
Despite how often I fall down on the job blogging about them, I really enjoy having a year-long reading project. The year before last it was poetry-memorization; this year it's been biography. I've gotten a lot out of steeping myself in both of these art forms, but what I really feel like reading now, after almost a year of biography biography biography, are NOVELS. Lots of novels. But that's not a "project," reading novels. That's more of a default setting, as far as I'm concerned. In fact, I pretty much believe that the Church of Novel-Reading is my spiritual organization of choice. So, how to give novel-reading a bit more structure, so that it's not only the soul-sustaining backbone of my literary practice, but also a fun game? The other day I stumbled upon the answer: amazing 11-year-old book blogger Annie is hosting What's in a Name 2?, the second incarnation of a versatile little readalong centering on books' titles. The qualifications are that participants should read, at some point in 2009:
- (A) book(s) with a PROFESSION in the title:
- (A) book(s) with a TIME OF DAY in the title:
- (A) book(s) with a RELATIVE in the title:
- (A) book(s) with a BUILDING in the title:
- (A) book(s) with a BODY PART in the title: and
- (A) book(s) with a MEDICAL CONDITION in the title.
Fun! Lots of books I've been meaning to read fall into these categories, so I'm thinking I'll actually try to spend a month or two in each slot. The only one I'm coming up a bit short on is the "time of day" category, so if anyone has a great brainstorm about it, let me know. My short lists so far:
Profession:
Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, by John Le Carré
The Judge and His Hangman, by Friedrich Durrenmatt
The Monk, by Matthew Lewis
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas ("Count" is a profession, yes?)
Time of Day
Death in the Afternoon, by Ernest Hemingway
The Thousand and One Nights (or some selection thereof)
Blood Meridian; or the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy
Relative
Autumn of the Patriarch, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Dead Father, by Donald Barthelme
Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser
Body Part
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salman Rushdie
A Severed Head, by Iris Murdoch
The Nose, by Nicolai Gogol
Building
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart
House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski
Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons
A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë
Medical Condition
Cancer Ward, by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
At the Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft
Blindness, by José Saramago
Sounds like a lovely year of reading to me! Now, to knock out the last few of these biographies over the next couple months, so that my to-be-read shelf will have some extra room on it.
